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Hi, I'm Lindsay Smith Rogers, and welcome back to our special series exploring racial bias in pulse oxymetry.

In the first episode of the series,

we looked into the history of the pulse oxymeter as we know it today, a device that has been

shown for decades to misread oxygen levels in patients with darker skin tones. We do recommend

that you listen to the first episode, linked in the show notes, before this one. But just to recap,

pulse oxymeters are tiny sensors usually taped or clipped to a finger

that read a patient's oxygen levels.

These devices, which play an essential role in patient monitoring,

rely on the passage of light to determine oxygen saturation.

Because the design of these instruments makes them susceptible to differences in skin tone,

pulse oxymoters perform differently in people from different racial and ethnic groups,

depending on their skin tone.

Specifically, for people with darker skin, the results are much more likely to be erroneous,

potentially falsely reassuring clinicians that a patient is getting enough oxygen when, in fact, they are not.

And a note on language.

These inaccurate readings are rooted in skin tone, not race.

So a light-skinned black person may get a significantly more reliable reading than someone with more melanated skin.

But because of this issue's disproportionate impact on Black people,

...